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Is 49ers HC Kyle Shanahan the Best Playcaller in the NFL?

Kyle Shanahan is the most famous and highest-paid head coach in North American sports who hasn't won a championship.

Grant Cohn

Dec 22, 2024; Miami Gardens, Florida, USA; San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan watches from the sideline against the Miami Dolphins during the fourth quarter at Hard Rock Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Sam Navarro-Imagn Images
Dec 22, 2024; Miami Gardens, Florida, USA; San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan watches from the sideline against the Miami Dolphins during the fourth quarter at Hard Rock Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Sam Navarro-Imagn Images / Sam Navarro-Imagn Images
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Kyle Shanahan is the most famous and highest-paid head coach in North American sports who hasn't won a championship.

And he's famous because of his playcalling. Despite his incredible collapses in three Super Bowls, he is still regarded as one of the top playcallers in the NFL. In fact, The 33rd Team's Dan Pizzuta recently ranked Shanahan the No. 1 play caller in football.

"Shanahan is still the standard, even after a year when the San Francisco 49ers fell short of expectations," writes Pizzuta. "Despite a number of injuries last season, San Francisco still finished the season 11th in EPA per play on offense.

"There is also no 'Shanahan offense' anymore, given the amount of times this offense has evolved. The 2024 version featured less play-action than ever for a Shanahan-led offense and thrived on opening up plays deeper down the field."

With all due respect to Pizzuta, I vehemently disagree with his analysis.

Sure, Shanahan is a good playcaller. And yes, the 49ers had injuries last season, but they also had lots of good players on offense. I'm talking George Kittle, Brock Purdy, Jauan Jennings, Jordan Mason and Isaac Guerendo. And yet, they were mediocre in the red zone because Shanahan lacked creativity.

In addition, he has proven to be one of the worst playcallers in the league at the end of close games. He becoms inexplicably pass-happy when he has leads and often gives them up.

Rankings Shanahan ahead of Andy Reid, Sean Payton, Sean McVay and even Ben Johnson is just absurd.

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Grant Cohn
GRANT COHN

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.

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